4 ms·

It boggles my mind that someone pays for a CMS. Given the abundance of free options what are they paying for?

christoph 5y ago
From experience most of the time it’s a smooth talking sales manager from a commercial CMS company going in and selling a dog to corporate IT with promises of security, scalability and “cost efficiency”. I’ve been on the delivery end of numerous contracts like this over the years. The early big red flag is when you as an organisation are asked to send multiple developers on £xk per day training courses out of your own pocket so they can become “certified”, with the promises of lucrative long term contracts. Ultimately this always ends badly in my experience.
1123581321 5y ago
In the case of Craft, paying for a better starting point for the content model and editing experience we want to provide. It saves time, in other words.
shoelessone 5y ago
I'm assuming you're talking about CMS in this "space", which is to say likely used by small to medium sized companies. Others have spoken to that already. That said, just to make sure you're aware, some companies pay hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars (I don't know first hand about millions, but I know hundreds of thousands is easy and I'd easily guess million+ isn't unheard of) annually just in licensing for "enterprise" CMS.
- chalcolithic 5y ago
  I can only assume that a lot of work by salespeople was performed in every single such case?
bsder 5y ago
Problems and support are somebody else's business. For example, I don't want to be IT support for my company's WordPress installation. I am willing to pay $100 per month so that I can tell the VP of Marketing "Please go talk to the nice people at <Wordpress Provider> about why the two buttons in that theme don't align to the same right margin. Tell them to send me an email if something needs analyzed on our side. KTHXBYE." I also don't want to have to navigate the blizzard of AWS required in order to implement something that won't fall over when 3 canaries and pigeon decide to bang on it--let alone if HN features it. I imagine that the CMS space is quite similar.
- chalcolithic 5y ago
  Yeah, but Wordpress is an open market, it's vast and very competitive. Other CMSes don't look attractive in that regard

From experience most of the time it’s a smooth talking sales manager from a commercial CMS company going in and selling a dog to corporate IT with promises of security, scalability and “cost efficiency”. I’ve been on the delivery end of numerous contracts like this over the years. The early big red flag is when you as an organisation are asked to send multiple developers on £xk per day training courses out of your own pocket so they can become “certified”, with the promises of lucrative long term contracts. Ultimately this always ends badly in my experience.

1123581321 5y ago

In the case of Craft, paying for a better starting point for the content model and editing experience we want to provide. It saves time, in other words.

shoelessone 5y ago

I'm assuming you're talking about CMS in this "space", which is to say likely used by small to medium sized companies. Others have spoken to that already. That said, just to make sure you're aware, some companies pay hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars (I don't know first hand about millions, but I know hundreds of thousands is easy and I'd easily guess million+ isn't unheard of) annually just in licensing for "enterprise" CMS.

chalcolithic 5y ago
I can only assume that a lot of work by salespeople was performed in every single such case?

bsder 5y ago

Problems and support are somebody else's business. For example, I don't want to be IT support for my company's WordPress installation. I am willing to pay $100 per month so that I can tell the VP of Marketing "Please go talk to the nice people at <Wordpress Provider> about why the two buttons in that theme don't align to the same right margin. Tell them to send me an email if something needs analyzed on our side. KTHXBYE." I also don't want to have to navigate the blizzard of AWS required in order to implement something that won't fall over when 3 canaries and pigeon decide to bang on it--let alone if HN features it. I imagine that the CMS space is quite similar.

chalcolithic 5y ago
Yeah, but Wordpress is an open market, it's vast and very competitive. Other CMSes don't look attractive in that regard